"As a little boy at school, I stole an old slipper belonging to the teacher, and used it as a hat in the games I played in solitude. In 1936, I constructed a Surrealist object with an old slipper of Gala’s and a glass of warm milk. Years after my school-boy prank, a photo of Gala crowned by the cupolas of Saint Basil revived my early fantasy of the “slipper-hat.” Finally Madame Schiaparelli launched the famous slipper-hat. Gala wore it first; and Mrs. Fellowes appeared in it during the summer, at Venice.

The high-heeled Schiaparelli shoe hat was created in 1937 in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. The idea came from a photograph taken in 1933 by Dali's wife Gala, showing the artist wearing a woman's shoe on his head and another one on his shoulder. [*]

1932 (According to DaliPhoto.com) | Salvador Dalí

Photograph by Gala Dalí

Source: DaliPhoto.com (Apparently not available anymore)

The hat was captured for posterity in a photography by Georges Saad, published in the October 1937 number of L’Officiel de la Mode et de la Couture … [*]

1937, October | L'Officiel De La Mode # 194

Caption reads: the very original hat represents a black felt shoe with red heel

Photograph by George Saad

Source: L'Officiel De La Mode

... and Gala herself can be seen wearing it in a photo taken by André Maillet in 1938. [*]

1938 | Gala Dalí wearing the Schiaparelli outfit shown above

Photograph by André Maillet

This hat, which belonged to Gala, entered the museum collection [Palais Galliera] in 2013. On her return to France from the United States in 1947, Gala gave it to her daughter Cécile Eluard. [*]

And now to wrap it up, after the abused "glass of warm milk" above, more words of wisdom from the Maestro:

All my life I have been preoccupied with shoes, which I have utilized in several surrealist objects and pictures, to the point of making a kind of divinity of them. In 1936 I went so far as to put shoes on heads; and Elsa Schiaparelli created a hat after my idea. Daisy Fellowes appeared in Venice with this shoe-hat on her head. The shoe, in fact, appears to me to be the object most charged with realistic virtues as opposed to musical objects which I have always tried to represent as demolished, crushed, soft–cellos of rotten meat, etc. One of my latest pictures represents a pair of shoes. I spent two long months copying them from a model, and I worked over them with the same love and the same objectivity as Raphael painting a Madonna.

Salvador DalíThe Secret Life Of Salvador Dalí (Dial Press, 1942)

Last but not least, the André Perugia shoe used by Elsa Schiaparelli to model her shoe-hat.